Social inequality and urban regeneration in Barcelona city centre: reconsidering success

Abstract

Across some Southern European cities, urban renewal programmes are seen as the primary means of alleviating concentrations of poverty and social inequality by improving local living conditions. Over the long-term delivery phase, such area-based interventions are often confronted with unforeseen macro-scale urban dynamics related to mobility of people and capital. Since the mid-1980s, Barcelona’s municipality has introduced a series of urban renewal programmes – PERIs (Special Plans of Interior Reform) – to deal with deprived neighbourhoods of the city centre suffering from poor housing conditions, inadequate services and infrastructure, and decreasing population. Selective demolition (or esponjamiento) was a key mechanism to create new open spaces in the crowded city centre whilst building new housing stock to relocate families. Urban interventions ranged from large-scale demolition of entire blocks in the Raval neighbourhood to micro-scale demolitions in the Santa Caterina & Sant Pere neighbourhood. This paper seeks to evaluate and compare the social and urban effects of urban renewal programmes in the two neighbourhoods between 1985 and 2009. Longitudinal quantitative analysis is employed to isolate demographic, socio-economic and housing changes, consider the remarkable increase in foreign population unforeseen in the original programmes, and hint at changes in space consumption and housing affordability. Finally, questions on inequality and state-led gentrification are raised, whilst considering dynamics of social and spatial desegregation as well as population substitution and displacement.

Understanding Immigrant Population Growth Within Urban Areas: A Spatial Econometric Approach

“…These areas are characterized by an informal housing market, which is for the most part comprised of substandard dwellings. Thus, in contrast to the findings of Malheiros and Vala (2004) for the late 1990s, the territorial pattern of immigration in Spanish cities has been defined until recently by a high concentration of immigrants in the cores of metropolises, and not in the suburbs (Arbaci and Tapada-Berteli 2012). We have seen a shift in immigrant populations towards the peripheries of urban areas, which has resulted in a new ethnic geography.…”

Gentrification and displacement: urban inequality in cities of late capitalism

“…This was useful to provide an overall description and explanation of the process. However, it is worth noting (1) that gentrification can be traced back to the late 1970s and 1980s in other contexts as well, such as in provincial cities of the Global North (Dutton, 2005) and Southern European urban centres (Arbaci & Tapada-Berteli, 2012); and (2) that gentrification is now a global process that has also spread to cities in the South as well as to the suburbs, the countryside and even to slums. The expansion of gentrification has been explained as the result of (1) the international dominance of neoliberalism (Brenner and Theodore, 2002;N.…”

Desindustrialización y crisis en la Barcelona posolímpica: ¿hacia una ciudad dual?

“…Hay diversos factores que se pueden asociar a este comportamiento residencial. Por un lado, en el caso de la clase de servicio, hay que tener en cuenta los intensos procesos de regeneración urbana que se han llevado a cabo durante las últimas décadas en Barcelona, especialmente en Ciutat Vella (Arbaci & Tapada-Bertelli, 2012) y en el Poblenou, a partir del Plan 22@ (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2011), los cuales han habilitado nuevas zonas residenciales para clases medias en la ciudad. A ello hay que sumar la transformación del litoral barcelonés, con efectos en la misma línea.…”